Kinvert

So am I correct I'd be exporting the Spine JSON, then parsing that to output new JSON that's in the form you wrote it in that second codepen?

Holy crap dude. How many times have you earned that (Superhero) badge? Something tells me you wrote all this in less than half the time it will take me to read it and figure out how it works lol. This is amazing. Will get back after I wrap my head around your reply. Thanks a ton!

I mean to be honest I don't know if I need them. That's part of the problem I'm far enough out of my element here. The current aim is to make something sort of like this, but less cartoony and including arms and legs etc: and animate them, at least at first, to play an animation when a student gets an answer correct, or another animation if they get the question wrong. Later on, the goal will be to also have the character work in mini math games, and also the students should be able to program the characters similar to Scratch (Scratch characters are moving around in canvas, for reference). Would this potentially change the eye color from white, for example? I mean for the very initial demo, I could swap one SVG mouth for another, and do some quick tweening to make the avatar look happy. But one of the big issues, is I hope I can nail down how the data will be structured in the database. It seems like Spine likes to have a big PNG which has each arm, hand, leg, the head, every part in it. Then an Atlas which is JSON describing more or less which pixels represent which part of that big image. Then the JSON containing the skeleton and animations. But another way, more aligned with GreenSock (I think) might be storing SVG elements for each part. The animations might be a big script, with 'happy' being a function I can call which consists of a series of tweens aimed at #left_arm (which each left arm would have that ID). After I go with a database structure it's a fair bit harder to switch back. I can't see far enough down the road to know if I need bones and joints or not to be perfectly honest.

How long do you think it would take you to take a file like this and turn it in to your tween commands? https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/blob/3.8/spine-ts/canvas/example/assets/spineboy-ess.json I can take your estimate, multiply it by 10 (because it will probably take me at least that long), and see if I can get it done before my 2 year old graduates high school. In particular I am referencing the JSON. Sorry I sort of maybe asked questions twice. I think you were responding while I was expanding on my question.

Conversation with Spine: http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Questions-Considering-Buying-Spine-14543 I think this is animating multiple characters with more or less the same skeleton and animation: http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-skins#Skin-bones Hoping to do basically the same thing but hopefully with SVG so it's easy for users to assign colors to their animated avatar. I also doubt I can make something look that good manually manipulating bones. I think I need IK etc to help a newb like me. Not sure if you guys have tools to do this, or if there is a way to export from Spine and bring it in to your system to animate the SVG.

Hello, Please excuse any stupid questions. I'm a Mechanical/Aerospace Engineer building a prototype myself and I have no formal training in this. I am making a web app where users can create a custom avatar. They'll be able to pick from multiple heads, arms, bodies etc, and be able to set colors, positions, and scales. For example they may want their creature to have larger ears angled down like a floppy ear bunny. The skeletons will basically have the same number of joints, but some bones could be moved/scaled. The avatars will need to be animated, and since users can choose from many parts, I need to make sure there is a good workflow. Hopefully we animate this more or less once, and that animation can be applied regardless of which skin. Basic data can be brought in such as arm_scale=1.15. The initial plan is to have everything in SVG. But that said to do everything I want I may need to get this to work in Canvas or WebGL. I have no experience in animating, but I'll probably be the one making the first demo before we bring someone in. This being the case I probably need an easy interface with IK etc. Currently looking at doing the animations with Spine. However it sounds like they don't handle SVGs well, and I don't see a great way to handle changing colors if everything is rasterized. For SVG users could choose any RGB they want and I can update Fill on the fly. Rasterized seems like they'll have fewer color choices, and I'll have to fill the database with many instances of the same leg with multiple colors etc. How does your rigging system compare with Spine? Does your system have the ability to bring in Spine Exports to do the animations? I'm looking at their JSON https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/blob/3.8/spine-ts/canvas/example/assets/spineboy-ess.json and I'm hoping you guys have a way to parse this and apply those translations to SVGs. I'm hoping to get this right the first time since at the moment I'm getting ready to set up the database to store what I need. In the long run I see a lot of man hours going in to this, so I'm hoping I make the right choice early on. Also in the long run, we might want the users to be able to control their avatar in small games, or also program their avatars to do things and the avatar would carry out that program. Since this is my first post, if this goes through I'll link to my conversation with Spin for reference in a reply. Don't want the post to vanish. Again, apologies for any stupid questions. This isn't my area of expertise. Thanks! Keith